“instead
of truth and knowledge being handed down by experts, it will slowly
emerge from the masses”

“The
webs greatest miracle is convenience, but the price we pay is in
accuracy” Lee
Siegel

“The
webs roots are in a the culture of freedom and self-expression that
can be traced back to the 60’s counter culture in San Francisico”
_

-Aleks
Kratotski.

Previously,
computers had been the
preserve of governments and the military,
but new, cheaper models in the 70’s began to put the technology
into the hands of the masses. The Altair 8800 was the first.

John
Perry Barlow from the Grateful Dead, joined The
Well,
He believed that the internet was a challenge to traditional
structures of authority.

Used
in the right way, the web can fundamentally harness the power of the
crowd and change political landscapes. Ory Okolloh- used the
internet to challenge the results of the election in Kenya and cover
the ensuing crisis. Site called Ushahidi.
Allowed ordinary ppl to record attacks and document the crisis. This
put pressure on the authorities to address the problem.

“A
paradigm shift on a par with the invention of the printing press.”

Aleks
Krototski

6th
of August 1991. The first website went online at Cern, just outside
Geneva- Tim Berners-Lee had written HTML and invented the world-wide
web.

“The
web is deliberately structured in a way that resists authority.
Equal access, you don’t need permission to visit or create, there
is no centre and no controlling authority, and it was given away for
free.”
--Aleks
Krotoski

Conflict
between those who saw the web as a place to share and those who saw
it as a place to buy and sell. Berners Lee vs Bill Gates.

“The
web challenges trad notions of ownership, creativity and power”

-Aleks
Krototski

Napster-
founded in 1999 by Shaun Fanning-

Loss
to the british music industry so far = approx £531 Million.

You
Tube posted its first video in 2005. Now it has more than a billion

view
a day. Each minute, 24 hours of video are uploaded.

Episode
2- Enemy of the State?

Twitter
and Iran- Twitter was developed in SF in 2006.

2 million tweets sent out of Iran in the first 18 days
of the protests by over 500,000 ppl

At its height, 2 million tweets were posted about Iran

Every
hour

“ The
web is a tool-box for protest, It’s unmediated , its interactive,
and its mobile. Unlike Television” A
Krotoski.

“Imagine
how quickly the Berlin Wall would have fallen if Twitter had existed”
Stephen
Fry

Wikileaks- Allows
the audience to anonymously blow the whistle on governments and
corporations. Has 1.2 million documents on its database.

has
named a list of BNP members

publicised
the contents of Sarah Palin’s email account

published
classified documents about Guantanemo Bay

“The
net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”

John
Gilmour- This is known as The Streisand Effect

Haystack-
designed by Austin Heap- a way of allowing Iranians to bypass state
censorship of facebook and twitter- without fear of detection

Climate
change Campaign-
The webs’ ability to bypass traditional electoral politics- “The
web has changed the nature of community. You no longer have to
physically proximate to other people”

“People
can bypass party politcs and rapidly mobilize behind a single issue”
Aleks
Krotoski

“If
you have a communication system that has no central control, that is
unbreakable, that can amplify a message, then information becomes
super-charge. In the right or wrong hands it take son massive
significance in battles against authority. Anonymous users can take
on the role of investigative journalists, by publishing information
and protecting primary sources”. –Aleks
Krotoski

China-
has 253 million online, more than any country in the world.

Ruled
by the Communist party for the last 60 years

The Great Firewall of China- 300,000 Chinese are secretly

involved
with censoring the web inside China. They are called

“internet
commentators” and they plant state-approved

commentary
on blogs and social networks. They are paid 50

cents
per post. The 50 cent army is up to 300,000 strong.

May 2008 – Sceczhuan earthquake. The incident was reported

by
Chinese citizens. Amateur sources replaced state media

coverage
of the disaster and relief efforts.

“One
of the biggest innovations in surveillance in recent years has come
about through the growth of social networking sites. Once ppl make
visible who their finds are its possible to search for covert
communities” – Ross
Anderson, Cambridge University.

“The
web can empower a government to repress and insurrection, it can
empower the insurrection itself”- Lee Siegel

“We
are beginning to see a rising political consciousness in nations that
have been suppressed by dictatorships”. Al
Gore
Iran, Burma…

Paypal-
handles 60 billion dollars in transactions every year.

Facebook-
350 million users. If it was a country, it would have the third
biggest population in the world

The
web and extremism- The web has linked extremeists. Al Qaeda and the
Taliban were early adopters and regularly disseminate material
through the internet.

Portable
Homeland-
the web replaces physical borders for these disparate extremists. The
web collapses distances and allows for accelerated radicalization. Or
cyber-balkanisation. Or Homophily.

Estonia-
2007 cyber-attack. ‘denial of service’ where a site is attacked
by thousands of requests from hackers, eventually paralyzing it.
Estonia’s entire web infrastructure was effected. It had to
completely isolate itself from the global web. Rumoured to have been
initiated by teenage Russian students.

Episode
3- The Price of Free

“20
years after its creation, the internet offers us unprecedented access
to free information. But we pay with a commodity perhaps more
precious than gold, with intimate information about ourselves” –
Aleks
Krotoski

“The
product online is not the content. The product online is you” –
Douglas
Rushkoff

Users
around the world make 76 billion searches a month on Google. In a
day, we post 3 million images on flickr. All for free. In a month 350
million of us browse through the webs blogs. For Free. But……

Every
month Google
gathers
billions of search terms that helps them to refine their user profile
of you and sell increasingly more precisely targeted advertising.
Cookies on your machine send information to third parties about your
web habits.

“The
reality is, online life is a trade. You pay for a free web with the
currency of information of who you are as a user and what your clicks
across the web say you are interested in. Trading information on web
users is the guiding principle of a free web”

-Aleks
Krotoski

The
dot com Boom.
Between 1995 and 2000, over 20 million .com names were registered.
But…… the dot com crash came in early 2000. The NASDAQ lost a
quarter of its value. Half of these new .coms were bankrupted.

Google.
One of the biggest money-making machines in history. Did this by
turning its consumers into commodities. It has turned our curiosity
into its goldmine. Every day 2 billion searches are made in 40
languages. YouTube has 1 billion views per day. Google has become one
of the richest and most powerful companies in the world by giving
away their products to consumers for free…

But
its net profits for 2009 were more than 6.5 billion dollars……..
How does it do this?

Every
time we use google, we help them make money because google
search and google mail and google docsdeliver
users so precisely to relevant advertisers.

How
does Google search work?

It
uses a link-counting algorithm to find the sites that are most
relevant and interesting to the searcher.

“What
if you knew precisely what your customers want at any time and could
instantly provide them with it?”

-Google
can do this because when we type in google search we are stating what
we want.

Adwords-
specific ads appear in two sections of the google search. If you
click on any of those ads, money will flow to google as the
advertisers are paying
per click. This
is perfect for advertisers. A selling process initiated by the
consumer, who is looking for something in particular.

Price=
Bid x Quality.

So
Joe’s Cars will be top of the ‘new car’ search if they bid a
high amount and also if google approves the quality of their website.

“The
first rule of the internet is that you can speak to each individual
as though they are a different person. It’s not a broadcast
mechanism, it’s a narrowcasting mechanism. Adwords is a single
message to single person every time”

Eric
Schmidt, CEO of Google

“It’s
catching people in motion. Already goal orientated. Already half-way
there. The products online are the eyeballs that are looking at
content.” -Douglas
Rushkoff

Behavioral
targeting

When
advertisers pay to receive information about our surfing habits. Our
movements are tracked by Cookies. Every click as we browse leaves a
digital fingerprint.

“We
are sort of re-decorating the store for each customer who walks in”
–Jeff
Bezos, CEO of Amazon

But
faced with overwhelming choice, consumers tend to stick with what
they know. – Homophily!

“Recommendation
engines are very good at figuring out what ppl like me would do and
telling me what that is so I can then find out what ppl like me do. I
can become much more like a person like me. Recommendation engines,
by telling me what ppl like do and encouraging me to be like a person
like me, they help me to become more proto-typically one of my kind
of person and the more like my kind of person I become, the less me I
am me and the more I am a demographic type.”

-Douglas
Rushkoff- Author of Life Inc

“16
years of web commerce has utterly transformed what privacy means in
the 21st
century. A whole generation is growing up in public.” – Aleks
Krotoski

“What
we have done is limit the range of human expression on the internet
to those things that are market friendly. Look at facebook. Utterly
conformist and rigid profiles. You must define yourself by what books
you buy, by what movies you like, by what actresses you aspire to, by
whether you are single, married or looking, by things that the market
understands.” -Douglas
Rushkoff

Episode
4- Homo Interneticus?

Whether
we realize it or not, through the web, we are all participating in
an extraordinary experiment, the outcome of which is far form
certain- Aleks
Krotoski

South
Korea-
10 times uk broadband speed. The most wired country in the world
Thousands of cases of internet addiction.

Susan
Greenfield- Neuroscientist. Concerned that because the web is virtual
and that there are less real consequences to our actions online, that
children are growing up without a real understanding of cause and
effect.

Generation
Web- By the time Generation Web reach adulthood, they will have spent
10.000 hours online.

Social
Networks.

In
2004 facebook was a simple college website at Harvard

2009-
350 million facebook accounts.

23
million in the uk. More than half log in daily for more than an hour.

“The
key criticism of facebook is that it makes friendship meaningless and
that undermines society.” Aleks
Krotoski

Status
updates- pioneered by facebook. Users didn’t have to search for
information. Information came to the. Facebook became an information
loop.

“It
is this culture of real-time updating and not the number of friends
that is the big shift that facebook has contributed to our
relationships” Aleks Krotoski

hyperlinking-
does darting from link to link make us lazy and easily distracted?

“When
you grow up expecting to be able to find information at a moments
notice, what does it do to your ability to internalize information?
“–Clay
Shirky

“The
really big surprise was that ppl seemed to be skipping over the
virtual landscape. They were popping in from sites, looking at one or
two pages and then going on. No-one seemed to be staying anywhere
for very long”

Professor
David Nicholas- University College London

This
research suggests that the web is converting us from thinking
linearly to thinking associatively. From Hedgehogs to Foxes

“Marshall
Mcluhan realized that people always judge new media by the standards
of old media. So the internet is all about networked relationships,
but people still judge it as if it was static content. And so you
look at you tube and you say this is a silly cat video and judge it
as content instead of saying this was something that one person
created in their garage and that three other people collaborated on
and added toand that is part of a culture of creating and sharing
that is more important than the content itself. Look at audiences
for sit-coms or Hollywood movies. They are just passively consuming
these linear mediums.”

-Jonah
Perreti- Co –Founder of The Huffington Post

Barack
Obama-

Chris Hughes co-founder of facebook took a years’ leave from facebook and went to work for the Obama campaign
During the election year, Obama had three million facebook friends and studies showed a third of all under 30 year olds used social networking to communicate their politics

“The
technology of the web, with its feedback loops, viral collaborations
and associative connections appears to have attracted young ppl to
politics on a scale that hasn’t been seen for generations.”-
Aleks
Krotoski

“Perhaps the most amazing the most amazing thing about this revolution is that we’ve seen all of this profound change in just twenty years. This isn’t the end, it’s merely the beginning.” –Aleks Krotoski